For many people, the road to coding starts with free courses, either online or in person. Bootcamps, jobs, meetups, they all come later, but first things first, coders-to-be want to see if they have some aptitude for this stuff.

The internet is alive with people looking to teach others how to code. We’re going to be focusing on coding and developers this month, and we thought our audience might be well served by learning about some free options for dipping your toe into the world of coding (or just staying sharp).

EdX is a consortium of top universities and institutions which offers free classes online. There are options available, depending on the class, to buy a certificate from the university which shows you completed the material and passed the class. The offerings on EdX are as broad as college offerings, but their computer science page is as thorough as you might imagine, with separate catalogues for classes on Python, Java, app development and more.

Colleges providing classes include Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and some institutions like Microsoft and Linux.

Started by Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, Khan Academy is a nonprofit online school with the goal of making education freely available for everyone. With short videos and practice exercises, students can go at their own pace. Programming courses include intro to HTML/CSS, intro to SQL and more advanced courses in JavaScript and more.

One of the most popular resources on the web, Codecademy has both a free and a paid option. This school has everything, with detailed instruction at every level of every coding language. It was rated as the top online coding school by WIRED.

One of New York’s top coding schools has a full scholarship option available for people who earn less than $50,000 a year. It’s called the Mobile Dev Corps, and offers a full-time 16-week program. Applications are competitive, with only 20 students chosen last year. Students will learn both Objective-C and Swift, and will be able to program mobile applications by graduation, the school says.

freeCodeCamp is a completely free, open source, immensely rigorous coding bootcamp. Students can go at their own pace through coding exercises and project building. The school offers a Full Stack Developer certificate, but estimates that it takes about 2,000 hours of work to complete it, or about a year of part-time coding study.

This one is for our younger readers. NPower is a Brooklyn-based program with branches in cities around the country for 18-25-year-olds who are not in school or employed. The program teaches entry level IT and web development training with the goal of preparing students for the CompTIA A+ exam.